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NYSE Top 5
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Smarter footwear choices this year led to a more enjoyable NY Climate Week - in particular, an excellent fifth annual ICE Climate & Capital Conference yesterday afternoon featuring investors across every asset class as well as a number of our NYSE-listed financials / real estate / infrastructure companies.
Tough to compress four days into two minutes, but three sentences we heard that stood out:
-Sector fundamental analysts now have to cover both their sector and the insurance sector to do their jobs.
-Adaptation investment opportunities are becoming clearer to the market. Schroders’ release on resilience investments here.
-The merge of carbon allowance and carbon credit markets is accelerating (see Canada release here).
-Brian Matt, CFA, Head of Sustainability Advisory, NYSE
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1. Feedback rolls in on 14a-8 rescission
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Given the midweek timing of the SEC release, we only heard from a few sources by the NYSE Top 5 #248 deadline; linkdrop format for a few other takes that might be useful:
-Cooley (here) and other providers have noted that 2027 might be seen as a “last chance proxy season” for proponents - and cites that several companies have received early proposals asking them to lock in existing shareholder proposal process/thresholds in their bylaws. Freshfields has recommendations for this proxy season
here.
-The Shareholder Primacy podcast has its latest edition here, covering how private ordering played out on proxy access back in 2011, with eventually over 80% of the S&P 500 adopting proxy access into their bylaws despite the SEC proxy access rule (14a-11) being vacated.
-Several commenters on LinkedIn pointed out this statement on the home page of the Delaware State Bar Association: “The Council of the Corporation Law Section of the Delaware State Bar Association is incorporating the potential repeal into its annual review of Delaware’s corporate statutes.” By our (S&P CapitalIQ’s) count, 156 of the S&P 500 are incorporated in 29 non-DE states - if you’re in one of those, recommend setting alerts to watch any possible developments.
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2. TNFD publishes 2026 status report
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One constant in our local roundtables with NYSE-listed companies we’ve held throughout 2026 is at least one company mentioning adding nature-related disclosures in their latest reports. TNFD’s annual release notes
that it now sees over 800 companies that have formally adopted TNFD (up from 620 at last year’s mark), with TNFD-aligned reporters inclusive of those that report on similar standards more than doubling from 542 to 1154 (Page 19). There’s obviously a wide variance in nature materiality by sector - Page 20 has a useful sector benchmark as well as showing the depth of companies reporting on either their first, second, or third annual nature-related reports; Page 21 shows the percentage of companies aligning with each of the TNFD recommendations through three separate methodologies.
Investors’ progress on the ability to evaluate investees has its own set of stats on Page 14 - as we’ve heard over the last several years, there are still opportunities for education here. Note this week we saw another release of sector-focused guidance for the technology and communications sectors from TNFD here as well.
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3. G&A Institute benchmarks reporting from S&P 500, Russell 1000 companies
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Speaking of benchmarking - this release from the G&A Institute (free reg req’d) makes for an easy benchmark of “who” (among larger companies) is reporting “what” (across the various standards). While we saw 2025 reporting delayed from so many companies, nearly all continued their annual cadence, with 86% of the Russell 1000 publishing sustainability reports or comparable disclosures (down from 91% in 2024).
GRI alignment saw its first significant uptick of the decade, with 57% of the Russell 1000 reporting vs. 54% in 2024. SASB reporting has leveled off at 79% of larger caps, TCFD inched down to 64%, 35% have made SBTI commitments, and 5% of the Russell 1000 aligned with IFRS S1 or S2. Interestingly, CDP Climate reporting dropped from 62% of large caps to 54%, though Water Security respondents rose to 33% from 29%. You’ll see sector trends across the entire range of companies beginning on Page 52.
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4. ISO draft net zero standard rejected, will take in more feedback
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ISO's draft Net Zero Standard (ISO14060), published in June, got pushback from standard bodies through a final vote not receiving the two-thirds majority needed to progress this week - covered here by Trellis and
here by ESG Dive. Comments focused on the general exclusion of carbon credits toward reduction targets (see Dcycle note here); ISO says it will refresh the proposal after taking in feedback.
As a reminder, ISO and GHG Protocol plan to align their standards development process going forward in order to produce a combined carbon accounting standard - we also saw a release this
week from GHGP showing feedback largely supporting its proposed changes to the Actions and Market Instruments (AMI) that deals with carbon credits - the current timeline for the full alignment of ISO / GHGP Corporate Standards is expected for Q4 2028.
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5. FTSE Russell asset owner survey shows increased concerns on shareholder rights, healthcare, water risks
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Our thinkpiece from FTSE Russell fits well alongside Morningstar’s survey from last week’s edition. Both represent the conversation taking place today between asset owners and asset managers. We think Page 11’s the best chart in this survey - showing the increasing interest in water risks, employee health, and shareholder rights.
There’s also a couple of results from asset owners that we were surprised by on the barriers to sustainable investing integration - concerns about reputational risk of greenwashing fell from 37% in 2025 to 22% in 2026, while fears that the asset owner couldn’t get the right data dropped from 36% to 25%. In return, asset managers cited costs to run responsible investing programs and concern about the quality of corporate reporting more frequently.
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